Emily Duckett (she/they) is a Black, queer, dance artist residing in Tkaronto. Their artistic expression is profoundly influenced by their intersecting identities. Since graduating from York University with a BFA in Dance and a Specialized Honors in performance and choreography in 2022, Emily has collaborated with esteemed companies such as Mocean Dance Company, SummerWorks, Wind in the Leaves Collective, and Buddies In Bad Times Theatre. Her work examines the links between body horror and feminism through a black, queer lens.At present, their artistic exploration centres on themes of queer time theory, decomposition, rejection, gut feelings, cravings and chaos, pleasure and paradoxes.

Jessie Garon is a Canadian dancer and performance maker. Raised on a family crop and cattle farm in Alberta, themes of sustainability, connection, and identity deeply permeate their work. Garon approaches the body as an unruly material—a vast, vibrating site of knowledge, negotiation, and transformation. Blending perspectives from dance, clown, and theatre, their work creates performance spaces as sites of respite and collective being that aim to invite empathy, curiosity, and a disruption of normative narratives around the body and belonging.

A 2024 Johanna Metcalf Performing Arts Prizes nominee, Jessie is the Artistic Director and co-founder of Vazari. Their latest creation, everything i wanted to tell you, earned multiple Dora Mavor Moore Awards, including Outstanding Production, Outstanding Choreography, and Outstanding Performance. They believe the porous magic of live performance is essential more than ever, bringing us back to the body at a time when so much pulls us out.

Kass Prus (Кассандра Прус) was born into a home immersed in ancestral Ukrainian traditions, music, art, and resistance to imperialism. Since learning to live more openly as a queer, non-binary, autistic, and physically disabled creator, Кассандра uses contemporary performance to queer & crip Slavic folk art practices as a way of reclaiming their heritage on their own terms. Recent supporters have included Toes for Dance/City of Toronto, Citadel+Compagnie/Fall for Dance North, and Pushmakers.

As an administrator, strategist, and facilitator Kass works to close the gaps between intent and action—particularly around accessibility, equity, and inclusion—in arts, culture, and wellness spaces. They bring learnings and skills from experiences with Dead Name Theatre, Crossroads Theatre, DanceWorks, Dusk Dances, Dancemakers, Generator TO, Mass Culture, and a Metcalf Foundation Internship at SummerWorks Festival, focusing on accessibility for artsworkers. They are passionate about cultivating shared knowledge and cross-sector collaboration to nurture care and reduce burnout in the arts.

Image Description: Kass Prus, a light-skinned non-binary person with short, cropped hair, lies on the floor wearing a black tank top. One arm is outstretched, resting on the seat of their rollator. They look through the space between the rollator’s slightly blurred black wheels and red legs toward the camera, which frames their gently smiling face. 

Alana Elmer (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist working across dance, film, television and voice. A graduate of The School of Toronto Dance Theatre, she spent nearly two decades as a company member with Toronto Dance Theatre, performing internationally and collaborating with a wide range of choreographers and artists. Her work on screen includes Kookie, Latched (TIFF), and Making Monsters.

Alana is interested in the body, individual instinct, structures that hold space, and the multitudes of ways we exchange. She is curious about how movement and presence as music can shift what we notice and how we understand one another.

Her practice moves between forms, held together by these curiosities and by the pleasure, and the work, of remaining open to what can happen, releasing one’s perception of what “should” be.

DA Hoskins is a queer dance artist based in Tkaronto, shaped by a lifelong exploration in opposition to societal conformity — an aspiration beyond their own teachings, toward a core sense of liberty that drew them to dance as their idiom. In 2008 they founded The Dietrich Group (TDG), a platform for interdisciplinary dance built on collective exploration, incorporated as a not-for-profit in 2013.

Their work pursues that liberty directly: physical exchange grounded in responsiveness and reflective immediacy, engaging each artist within a landscape of ownership and personal choice. Over 60 choreographic works, this practice has earned the Clifford E. Lee Award (Banff Centre), the KM Hunter Award, and the Canadian Stage Award for Direction.

TDG has presented eight full-evening works at Buddies in BadtimesTheatre, Festival TransAmériques, DanseDanse, WorldStage, Luminato Festival, and the da:ns Festival. Hoskins is currently developing Hush Don’t Destroy It, marking TDG’s return to live, ensemble-based performance.